My sincere apologies for being silent during the last months. There’s been quite a lot of work inside the company, but only a minor part of it is visible.

DaisyDisk Team is gone. Long live Software Ambience! It’s a company responsible for DaisyDisk and all our upcoming products. The staff has expanded, so we’ll be able to work on multiple products simultaneously.

Welcome Unclutter, a tiny utility that combines file storage, instant notepad and clipboard preview. Immediately accessible with a simple gesture or keystroke. Available right now on the Mac App Store near you.

DaisyDisk is alive and kicking. It got a brand new design with full retina display support, an improved future-proof engine and other interesting features you’ll soon be able to test yourself. This update will be freely available to all existing users of DaisyDisk in Q1 2013. Be patient, it’s worth the wait.

2011 has been a great year for the team and the product. We’ve released DaisyDisk 2.0, a rewritten and redesigned version of the app, featuring tons of improvements and some unique features. We’ve rolled out 4 updates that made the app look even better, work faster and speak with our customers in their native language.

No wonder DaisyDisk 2 is featured in the Best of Mac App Store 2011 category of the Mac App Store and is a runner up in TUAW Best of 2011, the best Mac utility app vote. Not to mention lots of positive reviews and, most importantly, our users’ satisfaction.

Right now DaisyDisk sells with 50% discount and the good news is that we’re leaving it that way. That’s right: a fantastic, state of the art tool for less than $10. That includes free customer support and nonrestrictive licensing policy.

What’s next? We have a long, long list of possible improvements, features and just crazy ideas, so the development is not going to stall. We’re not fans of abandonware :) At the same time, we’ll try to move on with one on our next projects that have been frozen throughout the year.

Have great holidays, see you in 2012. Stay tuned.
Yours truly, DaisyDisk Team.

Standalone version is available for immediate download and the app store one has just been submitted to Apple for approval.

DaisyDisk 2.1 features two localizations (folks from Germany and Russia, rejoice) and greatly improved support for OS X Lion. Sooth to say even previous versions of DaisyDisk have been “Lion ready”, but even minor glitches are annoying, so we’re getting rid of them. As well as trying to take advantage of new technologies :)

Starting from version 2.1 DaisyDisk is no longer Leopard compatible, you’ll need to use version 2.0.7.1 (available on our support page) if you still rely on PPC/Leopard.

What’s new in 2.1

OS X Lion:

Fullscreen mode

Window state resume

Volumes encrypted with FileVault 2 are clearly marked as such, support parallel scan

The App Store version has been submitted to Apple for approval and should be available… well, when Apple decides to approve it :)

For those curious: yes, DaisyDisk 2.0.7 works on Lion, but once 10.7 goes final, we’ll make an update to ensure full compatibility.

What’s next?
First of all, we’re re-opening the localization program, so if you want to see DaisyDisk on your own language and wish to contribute — drop us a line.
The next minor release would be dedicated to Lion compatibility. We’re also thinking about dropping support for PPC/10.5 in favor of providing better experience for Lion (and Snow Leopard) users.

Experience over features

Features don’t matter, experience does. Who cares if the app promises to do everything but doesn’t do a single thing right?

Being the best is not enough

It’s not enough to make the best app of its kind, one must try to build a perfect app (even though it’s impossible).

Design first

Make great design, then implement it in code, not the opposite. While thinking in code it’s easy to lose the scope and roll down to inferior solutions.

Don’t do anything you can’t do right

Ok, you have a great feature scheduled, but the final implementation is less than great. Postponing or even discarding the thing is likely the best idea.

Follow patterns, don’t imitate

Learn from others, try to understand why they’re doing things that way and only then lend the best patterns and integrate them into your app. Take a look at Zune or today’s iPad “competitors,” they’re pitiful, don’t repeat their creators’ mistakes.

Affordable premium

Merely working tools for just 39.95 are so Windows… Try to make premium quality software affordable.

Take advantages of your size

When you’re small, don’t pretend being big. Be fast, be flexible.

Iterate

You’ve made a great thing! You haven’t. Just throw it away and start it anew. Think. Add, remove, change, polish, repeat the process many times. Now compare your result with the original which doesn’t look any good at all…

Be honest

You’ve messed up something? How unexpected… Now go and tell this. Your customers may forgive you, but don’t expect them to forget.

Beautiful and useful

Don’t make anything unless it’s beautiful or useful. Try to stick with solutions that are elegant and needful.

First of all, we’re pleased to announce the upcoming update to DaisyDisk, version 2.0.7.

The first feature you’ll likely notice is favorite folders. Mark a folder as favorite and it will remain pinned to your list of sources forever. Not a big deal for occasional scans, but a real time saver for control freaks.

Scanning multiple volumes is now faster than ever thanks to the recent engine changes: DaisyDisk successively scans multiple volumes of the same hard drive, so the hardware load gets reduced and scan speed increases. This thing works automatically, you don’t even need to be aware of it.

The third interesting feature is related to the stand-alone version of DaisyDisk. Now, after the scan is complete, the application tells you if there’re significant amounts of disk space hidden in restricted folders i.e. taken by files and folders you are not normally allowed to access.

And finally, we’ve made a few tweaks and optimizations to DaisyDisk’s engine, so it handles folders with huge (no, *huge*) numbers of files without any hickups.

We hope to roll out this version in a week or two once we finish polishing all the stuff.

What’s next? There’re a few interesting things we have in a pipeline: I don’t want to reveal all the details right now, but we’ll keep you informed :)

One more thing. Starting from today we’ll try a more aggressive and flexible price model, so you should be able to get a premium quality product with a significant discount. We’re also considering separating Mac App Store and stand-alone versions of DaisyDisk by making certain (advanced) features only available in a stand-alone edition.

We love open source. DaisyDisk uses some popular open components that saved us hours of work. So, in order to give back something useful to the Mac dev community we’re making the code of our feedback component freely available.

We’re introducing DFeedback!

A small FAQ:

What license does it use?
We have chosen MIT License. It’s simple, it’s fair and it’s free of all the GPL’s bullshit.

Why not just use JRFeedbackProvider?
We used JRFeedbackProvider in the very first versions of DaisyDisk, but later replaced it with a custom component. While both look similar on screenshots, DFeedback has the following advantages:

polished look and feel

visual feedback for missing e-mail address when “reply to” is checked

optional system info (collected in the background, can be previewed by users)

Are there any downsides?
We haven’t build DFeedback as an all-purpose ultra-flexible component. It’s designed with DaisyDisk in mind, but you’re free to modify it to fit your special needs.

We are giving away 3 promo codes to DaisyDisk. Nah… Boring…We are giving away 5 $10 iTunes cards… so you can download some annoying tunes…
Seen this stuff a million times, no cool. Let’s try something different.

This week we are celebrating the successful start of DaisyDisk 2 by giving away 12 greatgreat books. Most of these have already become live classics and well worth reading by just any person interested in design, data visualization and building software. Almost $500 for us — priceless knowledge for you.

Any of these books can be yours, no matter if you are in New York, Munich or Moscow. Refer to this article on MacStories for details.

Why are we doing this? We’re surely promoting our software, DaisyDisk, but that’s not all.
We believe we can make the world a better place by sharing books we’ve learned a lot from. So, if you happen to win one, improve your design skills and contribute back by creating a great website or application, that would be the best investment for us. Spending the same resources on buying ADs is merely useful for anyone ;)

New logic for scanning as Administrator (was Super-User): now you can only scan local volumes and folders

FileVault support

Support for multi-touch gestures (refer to manual for the complete list)

New error handling logic (yep, built-in dialogs suck)

New registration system (DaisyDisk 1.x keys will not unlock 2.x)

Redesigned About, Feedback, Crash Reporter windows

Twitter integration (quite useless, but fun :)

Major under the hood changes and tons of tweaks you’ll unlikely ever need to know about :)

Localization is temporarily dropped (we’re not accepting localizations for some time, sorry…)

Not bad, huh…

DaisyDisk 2 is available in two versions: stand-alone (classic shareware) and Mac App Store. You can read more about them in this document.

Our upgrade policy remains unchanged: free upgrade if you purchased a license before October, 15 2009 or after September 1, 2010. $9.95 otherwise.

Ok, but how do you know if your license can be upgrade freely or not? The easiest way to do so is ask DaisyDisk itself. Just download and run the application and it will guide you through the rest of the process.

Now a small FAQ:

DaisyDisk 1.5.3 is the final version of DaisyDisk 1.x; we still provide support for it, but don’t expect future updates.

DaisyDisk 2.x will continue to evolve, we plan some very promising improvements. And no, it won’t make coffee.

We do not offer refunds or redeem codes for users willing to migrate to the Mac App Store for free.

In the future “stand-alone” versions of DaisyDisk may have extra features, not available in the App Store as Apple’s review policy prevents us from adding certain functionality.

The final release of DaisyDisk 2 “stand-alone” is not unlocked with DaisyDisk 1.x keys, they must be upgraded online. Contact support if you have any upgrade-related issues.

So, what’s next? First of all, we’d liked to take a small break and finish some stuff.
We’ll also start working on a side project (no details right now, sorry…) along with preparing DaisyDisk 2 updates. There’re lots of things we have to do, especially with an emergence of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion which plans to be a very interesting OS.